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Larry Lessig nails it in this brilliant review of Aaron Sorkin's film, The Social Network. Read the whole article, especially the 2nd part where Lessig (a lawyer/ professor of law) spells out how the legal establishment is completely missing the point.
QUOTE
Zuckerberg faced no such barrier [of entry into a market, as the makers of Nantucket Nectars did]. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today. Websites across the developing world deliver high quality coding to complement the very best ideas from anywhere. This is a platform that has made democratic innovation possible—and it was on the Facebook platform resting on that Internet platform that another Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, organized the most important digital movement for Obama, and that the film’s petty villain, Sean Parker, organized Causes, one of the most important tools to support nonprofit social missions.

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old

facebook innovation larry_lessig law copyright internet web2.0 tnr mark_zuckerberg aaron_sorkin sean_parker

Provocative, interesting talk by Johanna Blakley on copyright (absence thereof) in the fashion industry, and what that might mean for IP reform in other fields.
QUUOTE
Copyright law's grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry ... and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. At TEDxUSC 2010, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion's free culture.
UNQUOTE

copyright johanna_blakley ted_conference video fashion innovation

Michael Geist extends the discussion of publicly-owned Canadian museums and their often outrageous admissions fees (24/7) into the area of those same museums and/or archives charging outrageous fees for materials already in the public domain or belonging to the public.

thestar copyright copyfight museums archives access fees public_domain

Interesting article by Leah Sandals, pointing to a column in the Toronto Star by Michael Geist (see http://www.thestar.com/article/414495): why do museums and archives continue to charge the public (us) an arm and a leg to access material we, as taxpayers, already own? (I left a comment on this one, and expect that more comments will accrue.)

ownership copyright museums archives fees public_domain

Excellent points by Cory Doctorow on how "folk" copyright usage get eroded (sodded, more like) by corporate copyright law, and why that doesn't make sense: it's "a genuinely radical idea: [that] individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?). It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture."

copyfight copyright cory_doctorow law socialjustice